What makes Les Parapluies de Cherbourg such a great movie? It's certainly not the plot, which is as trite and formulaic as could be imagined. Two young people are in love. They decide to marry. Their families object, saying the couple are too young and don't know the meaning of love. The boy, Guy, who lives with his aging godmother and her pretty assistant Madelaine, is drafted and will be sent away for two years. Crushed, the couple spend one last night together. Inevitably, the girl, Genevieve, finds out she is pregnant with Guy's child. Concurrently, the umbrella shop owned by Genevieve's mother is not doing well, and she is forced to sell her jewelry to a successful young man named Roland Cassard, a not-so-secret admirer of Genevieve's. With Guy out of the picture and less than prodigious in his correspondence, Genevieve decides that Roland's proposal of marriage might not be such a bad idea after all, especially if he loves her enough to raise another man's child as his own. With Guy's letters held up due to combat, censorship, or just bad luck, Genevieve finally agrees to marry Roland, and soon afterward the couple leave Cherbourg for good, and having sold her shop, Genevieve's mother leaves also. Some time later Guy is discharged from the army after having suffered a minor gunshot wound. He returns to find his great love gone, and his godmother on her deathbed. He is inconsolable, and sinks into drinking, fighting, and depression. Eventually Madelaine, who we are led to believe was always rather fond of Guy, is able to bring him around. The couple marry, and with money from his inheritance Guy opens his own business, they have a child, and live happily ever after...
...Except that naturally Genevieve returns and she and Guy accidentally run into one another. In the final, heartbreaking scene, the old lovers realize what they once had and what they will never have again.
So, the plot isn't exactly earthshattering in its originality. One of the people with whom I saw this film described it along the lines of "the last gasp of 50s melodrama" and as a soap opera. Fair enough, but people still go to see The Marriage of Figaro enough times, so plot can't be everything, now can it?
Well, of course not. One of the things that seems obvious about Les Parapluies de Cherbourg is that probably anyone who watches it understands that, in a sense, the film is a deconstruction of a melodrama. The plot is not to be taken seriously on its face, but is rather being used to say things about cinema, class, youth, romance, marriage, and society.
This seems to be heady stuff for a pretty, musical, soap-opera, but the great thing about Les Parapluies de Cherbourg is that it is so astonishingly beautiful in every aspect (Deneuve never looked better, and the use of primary and secondary colors in the costumes and sets is exquisite), and so gloriously musical (this may be Legrand's best score, which is saying a lot), that you can enjoy the soap opera yet the next day idly find yourself marveling at the social detail of a story that asks so many questions in such an elegant way.
I suppose that the issue of marrying away from your social class is fairly worn and frazzled 40 years on, so much so that contemporary audiences may even gloss over that particular plot point. This is probably no great loss, since the film asks much more interesting questions as well. Are young people in love old enough to know what they really want? If a teenager approaches life and love like an adult would, will they deny themselves happiness once they become an adult? What does the child owe the adult they will become? Is it the opportunity to be happy when young, or is it the necessity of providing for comfort once old? Both Guy's godmother and Genevieve's mother have plenty of creature comforts, but both are also very lonely and unhappy, presumably having made poor romantic decisions earlier in life. Are Guy and Genevieve destined for such a future themselves? By the end of the film it seems quite likely, since each in their own way made the responsible and adult decision and married for comfort, rather than love.
My one problem with this line of thought is that the problem is not symmetrical; Genevieve is afforded the opportunity between being comfortable yet romantically unsatisfied, or the possibly more idealistic choice of marrying for love yet being poor. Guy has no such choice, he merely makes the choice between comfort and desparate loneliness, not much of a choice for the non-suicidal among us. The hitch here is that to resolve this problem we need to get into the head of Genevieve, a pregnant, scared, lovelorn 17-year-old girl living in a provincial French town in the late-50s. Once we in the audience have made this leap, the point is laid bare - Genevieve has no more confidence in the hope of young, romantic love than her mother. She is just as bourgeois and provincial in her outlook, and the idea that Guy hasn't written because he's unable is not her worry, since she is convinced that his love, as hers, is destined to wither and fade sooner rather than later. That she is proved wrong, that the lovers when united see everything that could have been but wasn't to be, shows the underlying tragedy in this sweet, lovable film.
Oh, one last thing: in addition to the film being as textually and visually rich as it is, it has another thing going for it. Every single word of dialogue is sung, to a magnificent, jazzy score by nouvelle vague favorite, Michel Legrand. I said at the beginning of this little essay that this may be Legrand's best score ever, well, one of the reasons for that is the fact that Legrand was given the opportunity to take over the film, to be a full collaborator. He was able to parley that responsibility into creating a masterpiece of sounds, of recurring, overlapping themes, and of a wash of musical colors as vibrant as those umbrellas adorning Genevieve's mother's shop.
